Salt
by andrine
Summary: Somebody's not what you thought. Somebody's more than you thought. And sometimes, words are exactly the wrong thing. IrvineSelphie.


A story told in two, for a pairing I think hardly receives the attention it deserves. IrvineSelphie... sort of. You can decide.   
  
As always, I don't own FFVIII, and thank you so much to all of you that have reviewed. You really, really are the best. Booyah.  
  
**Salt.**  
  
I.  
  
Sometimes, if you stand on the shoreline and breathe in deeply enough, you can taste salt through your nose, down your throat, into your lungs. For a moment, you exist in an almost-amphibious state of air and sea, and you think that it must feel a little like what mermaids feel all the time. Caught between the deep midnight color of the sky, the ribbon of butter- colored sand soft under the heels of your feet, the sound of water rushing over itself, you have lost a little bit of yourself to that ocean.  
  
Sometimes, if you stand close enough to the tide's edge, you become acutely aware that you are on the finite line between earth and water. You begin to wonder about, to question, the earth's stability. Does it anchor, cradling the sea in its giant dips and valleys, or is it, too, floating? You begin to question your own stability. You do not want to be drifting... you want to be swallowed in the greater wholeness of it all.  
  
And then, if you look at the ocean just right you can see anything reflected in its shimmering surface. You can see yourself more clearly than in any silver mirror. You'd have to use your imagination a little, though, because it isn't the cadaveric pose found in looking glasses. This image is moving, breathing, swaying, and churning; it is threatening to break free and be alive.  
  
You want it to.  
  
II.  
  
"Fuckin' hell...."  
  
I can barely hear you, you've got to speak up if you want me to hear you.  
  
"Motherfucking son of a--"  
  
Stop using such nasty language, it's such a nice day and you've just got to learn to enjoy yourself. All that anxiety will be the death of you. Now just speak up, so I can hear you over all this noi--  
  
Slap.  
  
The hand comes down hard against my left cheek, the impact of damp skin on damp skin sending droplets flying in time with the crisp smacking sound. I feel the sting, sway my head to one side and find a comfortable bed of sand against my face. The disembodied sense of drifting away from myself ends. I am jolted back abruptly, my dreamy spirit yanked back on a leash and stuffed into its body.  
  
...gaarghlgh.  
  
"...gaarghlgh."  
  
"That's a good girl... open your eyes. Good girl. Good."  
  
What would you know about good girls? Go 'way and stop bothering me.  
  
The same hand is against my face again, but this time the touch is almost gentle. Long, graceful fingers are pulling against my stubborn eyelids. The fingers are just as stubborn, seemingly taunting my eyes, "Dammit, if you don't want to open on your own we'll just have to do it for you."  
  
...ooo"uuchh"  
  
I am blinking slowly, like housecats do when they wake leisurely from a nap and saunter over to their food dish. Focusing on anything proves to be a problem, as every part of my head seems to have swollen tenfold and then found there's just not that much room in my skull. After a cursory check to make sure I can wriggle all my fingers and toes, which takes longer than I'd like, I move a shaky arm to grasp the foreign hand. It's cupping my chin now gently, with a mix of motherliness and something else.  
  
I grasp weakly, surprised at how numb everything is, and pull it away. Linked together with mine (how did that happen?) the hand feels familiar... slim frame with strong knuckles under deceptively smooth skin. There's a cold line on one of the digits. I squint crookedly and make out a polished silver band. It's the ring I gave him for his eighteenth birthday, claiming that he was now officially an adult and everyone had better stop giving him prank gifts.  
  
"I-Irvy." There's a huskiness that has crept into my voice.  
  
"Selph?" He lets it out in a sigh, and, oh yes, I remember that's my name he's voicing, "Selphie? Are you there?"  
  
"Duh." Whatever's happened hasn't deprived me of my sparkling wit, apparently.  
  
The coughing fit hits me like a truck. Before I can say "What the fuck?" I'm on my side, my lungs reacting with more force that I knew they had. It happens all at once: Irvine's hitting my back, there's loud whooping echoing through the air, I'm vomiting salty, salty liquid. I wretch for awhile after the contents of my stomach stop coming up, and then I calm down. Spent, my body falls back down. I feel like a baby -- new and weak and dependent.  
  
My eyes are open now, and I can make out Irvine pushing the other hand to his forehead and brushing away locks of matted chestnut hair. It falls in his eyes, brown through violet, and so much lovelier than mine. He looks kinda like some movie actor (what's his name?, the one I just saw starring in a romantic comedy the other day) when he angles his head like that, all prettiness and androgyny. Kneeling forward onto his shins a little more, he leans toward my face and furrows his brows. I've been his best friend for a forgotten spell of years, but I'm still touched to see such concern coming from him.  
  
"You're gonna be okay, right?" What is that I'm sensing in his voice? Fear? For a girl? Impossible.  
  
Sometimes I can't decide whether Irvine hates women or loves them. It appears transparent to everyone else, but I can't help looking through a jilted lens. Maybe he's a closet misogynist, taking a perverse pleasure from screwing women and leaving them before they're coherent enough to tell right from left. Or maybe what he says is real, and all he craves is a warm body to hold, closeness at night and day, closeness inside and out.  
  
He's an expert at doing that. In a way that nobody else can even attempt, Irvine can blend realism and surrealism so that just when I think I have it all figured out he'll go and do something that spins me like a top. Sometimes, around him, I feel I haven't got a sense of direction at all.  
  
My nerves have decided to wake up from their little nap, and I've regained most control over my body. I attempt a lopsided grin, "Yeah... I think so."  
  
With the return of sensation, I become aware of my surroundings. It's the same beach we'd been sitting on, but now I'm lying prone and helplessly horizontal. There's grains of sand stuck like sugar frosting all over my arms, thighs, stomach, and it's creeping up the bottom edge of my two- piece. My nose is running uncontrollably; it's the feeling of crying minus the eyes part. The half-full silver moon and it's reflected twin in the water cast just enough light for me to make everything out. I can see up to the rocky outcroppings far behind us, and there's nobody in sight save for Irvine. His hand is still over my hand, large enough to cover all of mine right down to the fingertips.  
  
I use it as convenient leverage to pull myself into a more upright position, not quiet sitting but close enough for now. Mousey brown hair stays stuck to my neck and the tops of my shoulders, a dirt color helmet. With the ungraceful movements of a child, I brush it away from my face.  
  
"What happened?" Feels like a goddamned whale ate me, threw me up, then decided to sit on me, that's what.  
  
Irvine's quiet for a little bit, which startles me. Irvine isn't normally quiet, or at least he isn't quiet because he doesn't have something to say. And all his words seem lost now. He's the talkative one, always drawling about this or that, which got him into a lot of trouble, and out of a lot of trouble, when we were little. I used to think this was very funny, but lately I've been thinking that everything would be better if we were more alike. His words always carry the veneer of fire and love and emotion, but they're not real. They're just as carefully picked out as a politicians. If we were more alike, if either one of us was more like the other, we wouldn't have grown in opposite directions.  
  
If I think about it enough, I'd even be willing to give up me to be more him.  
  
Of course, I can't tell any of this to him.  
  
He bites his lip a little, making it red and puckered, "How much do you remember?"  
  
I sit up all the way. I'm not stupid, Irvy, I want to say. People don't forget that easily. Everything's a matter of memory with him. Of the past, all watercolors and fireworks and light. This is what I mean about growing apart. I've moved aside the space in my brain for other things, new things. It's like cleaning out a wardrobe or an attic, and he refuses to do it.  
  
"Uhh... walking. Then sitting, and the sunset. And then talking, or something, don't really remember..." I'm surprised how easy it is to lie to him. Isn't it supposed to be hard to lie to your best friend? Aren't parts of you supposed to tingle and protest? Hidden not even deeply, just below the surface, I remember further than that, to what we were talking about. What he said to me. What he told me.  
  
But I don't want to deal with it, so I push it out of the way.  
  
I know he can't tell when I'm lying, because I'm so attuned to sensing that I don't change anything about my posture or my voice or where my eyes are looking to. So, essentially, I'm taking advantage of him. He put his soul on a platter when he told me that he loved me, and I'm putting him on hold the same way I put two weeks of calculus homework, an entire Saturday's worth of dirty laundry, and spring festival decorations on hold.  
  
He says to me, "Selphie," my name rolling off his tongue like caramel, "I love you. I've always loved you. But this is a different way... like another page of a book that touches the last one and isn't the same but a continuation. You get what I'm telling you?"  
  
And how fucked up is that?  
  
So I don't want to deal with it, and I lie to him.  
  
"Oh," his voice is expressionless. Not apathetic, but unreadable, and this time I am unable to stop my glance from falling downwards. Maybe I've underestimated him, and he's getting just as good at lying. Maybe. "After we talked," his voice does not fluctuate at all, and I swallow hard, "We stood up and walked to the rocks, remember?"  
  
There's a sudden night breeze. Pieces of Irvine's hair dance across his skin, the thin lines cutting across his perfect cheekbones and the angles and curves of his shoulders. His skin is so flawless the moonlight bounces off it, cream and quicksilver swirled together. So beautiful I could cry in jealousy.  
  
My arms shudder, the skin raising in tiny bumps down their length. Funny, I didn't think I was cold before. In fact, I do remember walking toward the rocks. And I remember feeling warm.  
  
"So I thought maybe you'd want to think... um, about what I said," He flushes a little; is he embarrassed? No, I know that look he has. Irvine's mad at himself, like the time he was caught stealing ammo magazines from the book store. He wasn't at all intimidated by the burly storeowner, possibly twice as old and definitely three times his size, but mad for letting himself get caught. He continues, pulling me away from my string of memories, "And you climbed the rocks, and I let you go on you own. To think..."  
  
I've always been the one that thinks, haven't I?  
  
"And I was looking off to the ocean, thinking about how blue the water is. Then I turned, because I heard it..." You're rambling, I want to say. Now he has a look I've never, in fifteen years, seen.  
  
And it hits me what he's getting at. I remember what happened.  
  
"You jumped." I jumped.  
  
I close my eyes, and I'm back there, wind rushing over me like gossamer, water hitting me like steel... pinpricks of pain everywhere melding together. Thick ropes of hair wrapping themselves around my neck, strangling me.  
  
And salt. Salt like a pool of tears.  
  
Everywhere salt. But I'm not... struggling.  
  
Sniffle. Sniff.  
  
Dammit, Irvine's crying. He's making it seem like he isn't, shoulders stiff and silhouette turned away like men do when they try to hide. Men are so silly sometimes, so unwilling to grasp truth and reality. Emotion is beautiful, I want to say so he'll understand, not something to hide from. So I can't understand at all the male fascination with apathy. Where's the beauty in living gray instead of the ten-thousand shades of happiness, hope, anger, hate? It is all pretty pointless, since I've seen him cry before.  
  
"Irvy?" I scoot a little closer to him, tentatively, the tone of my voice the only thing to imply it is a question I am asking him.  
  
"Sel... 'Elph," he uses the nickname I haven't had since long before, since stone walls and glass lighthouses, "W-Why would you do that? I know you didn't fall. Or at least you made yourself fall." He stops then, and lifts up red-rimmed, long-lashed eyes at me.  
  
"I..." There are a thousand things I could tell him.  
  
I only wanted to know what it felt like. The water was so very pretty, the exact shade of blue aquamarines are. I wanted to fly, and fall, and be caught by power. The atmosphere wasn't enough to support me anymore. I was made of lead, I would have dropped anyway. I felt like a mermaid. I was drowning on dry land. The air wasn't salty enough to taste anymore.  
  
Why are you made of lead? he'll demand. You didn't really want to jump. Why wasn't this reality good enough for you? Why aren't I?  
  
Because, I'll answer. Because I'm seventeen and I feel like I'm thirty-five - past my prime but not old enough to have acquired wisdom. Because my parents abandoned me in a drafty orphanage, and I'm fine with that. But all the home and love I've known for a decade was blown up, and I'm not fine with that.  
  
Because I've never even been kissed yet and I know you've been laid. How does that make you feel?, I ask myself in a shrink's voice. Would I want it any other way? Do I want to be touched and felt and tasted? I just want to stop thinking. I can't make sense of things anymore; I can't even predict what you're going to say next. And on top of it all, you go and tell me you love me. Not like that, mind you, like that.  
  
I've lost every constancy in my life, can't you see that?  
  
Stop. Rewind.  
  
"I..." Deep breaths, Selphie, deep breaths.  
  
"...wasn't trying to drown."  
  
Irvine's head lifts up, curved and pouted lips open and close before blurting out, "What do you mean? You were passed out! You could've died!" He reaches out for me instinctively, then clenches the fist and pulls it away.  
  
"Sometimes, you just have to know something. You just have to know."  
  
"Why are you always so cryptic?" Irvine's shouting now, but I can barely flinch.  
  
I don't answer, but look away, because he is my friend, or was my friend, and I respect that. He doesn't understand, though. He doesn't see things the same way I do.  
  
I think I could have, maybe, fallen in love with him too. I'm sure there were times along the way, when battle and excitement and saving the world was all we had, that I was in love with him. There are different kinds of love, though, and that was the love of savagery and blood. It wasn't the love of trust, faith, hope. Not the kind I needed at all. I wonder if Irvine Kinneas could ever be capable of giving that kind of love to me, the kind of love Squall and Rinoa found in the stars and we might have been able to find in the ocean. If he had offered me that sort of love, I'm certain I would have accepted the gift, a little because I wanted him but mostly because I wanted it.  
  
But you can't give what you don't have.  
  
"Fine. Fine. If you want to blame me, go ahead. If you can't deal with anything, go running away. You're hurting other people, though, and you'd better realize that." His voice is a prism, catching all the light in its angles and bending it this way and that.  
  
I'm not running away. I'm not a mental job. I'm not crazy, Irvy, I promise.  
  
Maybe I am.  
  
"Selphie," and his voice is diamond when he tells this to me, "you're just so selfish. You only look inside, never out."  
  
With that, Irvine abruptly stands up and heads up towards the car. His arms hang limply next to his smooth torso, softly moving up and down, and he's shivering, or crying. It's hard to tell.  
  
I want to open my mouth to say something, to call him back and finish this. But I realize he won't understand, because we've grown too far apart for me to grab him back into my world. We're different people now, and that's the only reason why he told me he loved me - because he wants me back. Maybe I would've been willing to play along for awhile, if I hadn't climbed those rocks and if I hadn't already tasted the air. In the end, it seems like we were both out to get the same thing, but we were already on parallel paths.  
  
I turn back to the ocean. Thanks, I want to tell it, for letting me be a drop of you. I stick my tongue out one last time, trying to print this lover's flavor on my memory forever. Even though I don't trust memory anymore, especially after this surreal night. Maybe Irvine was right, and I am being selfish. But sometimes you have to be, if you want to keep breathing.  
  
I stand, on two legs for the first time since the sea pushed me out, and follow his footprints to the edge of the road where I parked.  
  
One last look back. I've lost a part of me tonight, to that rolling, churning incubus.  
  
But I find myself not missing it at all. 


End file.
